Lori

Lori asked:

Just finished this and need a little help: 1) still not sure why Mr. Bevins appears with multiple eyes, legs, etc and 2) still a bit unclear on the reverend's journey--am struggling with why he was turned back to the "Bardo" and what he decided to finally do--more faith, more sacrifice? Any help or speculation appreciated!

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Jennifer Kennedy Bevins wanted to appreciate living on earth with all of his senses and regretted not doing so while he was living. So, his sensory organs are multiplied in the Bardo as a warped manifestation of his wishes. The reverend and all of the characters in the Bardo do not admit to having made any mistakes, or they at least come up with justifications for their mistakes they made while living. So, they can't move on until they are truthful with themselves.

Sophfronia Scott

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Secily I went back and investigated the reverend because it bothered me too. When they all jam into Lincoln at the same time and all look better or lose their affliction, the reverend becomes at ease and not afraid. I think when he went to be judged originally his fear of judgement was what he saw. He was also probably being judged for never being brave enough to make any difference. On page 271 when he has been listening to the yucky child abusers he figures it out. “Perhaps this is faith, to believe our God ever receptive to the smallest good intention.” Then he makes the move to run with and save Willie. When he’s caught in the carapace he has to decide and he goes to judgement again having understood grace

Ben

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Charles Cole Regarding the Reverend's fate: Who knows? In life, some things — many things — happen seemingly without justice or fairness or even explanation and perhaps we become obsessed (“Why did I get cancer?” “Why did my sister never like me?” . . .) The cause of our misfortunes (which in my experience we usually feel are undeserved) is rarely apparent to us, and perhaps that’s the point: Saunders shows us what it’s like to be disappointed w/o understanding. And just as life (or fate, or God) has no obligation to tell us why bad things happen to good people, neither does Geo Saunders. Indeed, if the author gave an explanation it would rob the Reverend’s story of its crushing sadness.

Sue The apparent damnation of the minister was puzzling to me, but it was also puzzling that he was allowed to run back to stay in the bardo. Perhaps he was being saved and tested for the role he eventually played. When the moment came that he totally forgot his own situation and grabbed the child to save him, he achieved a kind of redemption. His whole life he’d probably tried to be good in a conventional sense, but now he was called on to sacrifice himself. I think we have some Christian philosophy among the Buddhism.

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Question 1 is well answered by many of the comments below so I'll only focus on 2, regarding the good reverend:

I only read this book after I've read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, so this novel is to 'test' some the teachings in the Tibetan Book (TB). The Bardo in this book refers specifically to the state After Death and Before Rebirth. According to TB, when we 'wake up' in the Bardo after death, we take up a mental body, much like in dreams, we also have a mental body to move around in, do things, travel and it's most convincing. The 'ghosts' therefore cannot believe they are Dead, so they make up stories and invent terms like the sick box to refer to their coffin etc. The ones who cling onto this mental body in the Bardo are those 'having issues' with their deaths or tremendous grief/regrets while living, therefore they linger on there instead of naturally 'moveing on' to the next stage, the whole rebirth process, eg like the two the reverend met at the judgement. Some of the ghosts used to be very vicious people and they try to trap 'lost souls' like Willie to stay with them in that most awful state.

The problem the reverend had, I speculate, could be like this: he did his duty but maybe nothing more. I'm inspired by The Father Confessor in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game: the normal people are childlike in a sense they act according their natural tendencies and habits, they make mistakes, pay their penance, and all is well (eg the man that was judged and embraced before the reverend's turn). But the clergy are in the know, therefore much more is expected of them. The judgement scene is I feel more the reverend himself's own 'soul searching' than really Christ/God's judging him. He did sense that he had not done his utmost best to relieve the pain, help solve crisis and so forth. According to TB, regrets during lifetime affect your Bardo state a great deal, the reverend judged himself harshly without knowing it and he was so scared he ran away from the 'diamond palace' and was back in the cemetery. BTW, the 'back and forth' within a split of second is the nature of the mental body in the Bardo: imagine when we think of someplace, we are 'there' in the mind, there is no physical body to slow us down, the need to be physically transported. This is also what happened in the last moment when the reverend was entangled with Willie in the carapace, he blurted out 'That dreadful place...the diamond palace', the thought itself 'transports' him there.

He'd languished with the other ghosts in the cemetery for God knows how long, all the time agonising about the horror of the judgement and dared not making a move on. Willie's arrival woke them all up, some 'good spirits' began to band together to save the boy and the reverend was moved to join them, and maybe for the first time, put his own interest after someone else's. He was finally doing what he was supposed to do, and I have great hopes for him: the judging is more self-directed than by Him, so with a clear and cleansed conscience, he was well on his way to a good rebirth. (hide spoiler)]

Karen Evarts I'm feeling the need to let the words and citations just wash over me, to be in tune with the all-round humanity of Saunders's work. Hard, but incredibly rewarding book. I had the same kind of struggle when I finally got myself to read James Joyce's Ulysses. Well worth the effort!

Melissa I kinda thought maybe the Rev wasn't really damned. I mean, no one else went on a long walk after they died. I think maybe he hallucinated it before he died and that's why he ended up in the Bardo with his horrified face. No one else had physical manifestations unrelated to something that happened before their death. And Bevins' manifestation related to something JUST prior to his death that he thought. Could it maybe be the same for the Rev?

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Stephen Sagarin Attachment, even to religion, is to be overcome in the bardo... He let go of this, finally... (His earlier "vision" of heaven and hell is likely HIS vision, not identical for all who let go...)

Lea Ann I've thought about the reverend question a lot and it's one of my favorite topics to discuss in the book. To understand what happened to The Reverend at his time of judgment you need to understand (loosely) the five points of Calvinism (TULIP):
1) Total Depravity - man is dead and cannot be made to live without God. God decides who is born again and who is not.
2) Unconditional Election - God CHOOSES to give some people eternal life, without looking for anything good in them as a condition for loving and saving them
3) Limited Atonement - the benefit of Jesus Christ dying for our sins is ONLY available to the elect (see #2)
4) Irresistible Grace - God's grace for the elect make them willing entrants to heaven.
5) Preservation of the Saints - once you are saved you are always saved (if you are one of the elect that is)

So, see, it doesn't matter what kind of person you are, or what kind of life you live. You are either saved or not saved and only God can determine if you are saved. You and your actions or your thoughts have nothing to do with it. How do we know if we are saved? You don't. Pretty arbitrary?

Now before I get a lot of angry comments from theologians, I'm not saying the above is a full dealing with the nuance of these concepts, I don't have any degrees in religion, philosophy, or theology, I just read a lot. And you don't need to fully understand the above five principles to understand how they work for The Reverend's story in LITB.

Essentially, on earth, The Reverend preached this idea of pre-destination, you are either saved or not saved, so when it's time for his own judgment at the entrance to heaven, he finds that he is not saved. And nothing he can do will in purgatory will ever make it so he can get into heaven. He's trapped by the very theology he preached. So basically, he's responsible for the afterlife he finds himself in. I really liked this concept of our earthly beliefs constraining our ethereal selves.

But then at the end, when he sacrifices himself for Willie, he has the hope that maybe he was wrong and that in understanding he was wrong, he can maybe undo part of the afterlife he has created for himself. But we don't get to discover that if that is real or not.

April Holland I think he needed to go beyond preaching to doing. When he sets out to help little Willie, he was able to let go of the Bardo.

Leslie Depends on how many drugs the author was doing. I think trying to understand this novel is just a waste of time. On to better reads.

Jay As far as Bevins' charac., I think all of the Bardo residents appeared in the form of regret and preoccupation they held when they died. Only halfway through, but that seems true for all charac., so Mr. B regret's missing out on all of the sensory experiences life offers, it was his regret as he was dying and changed his mind. I'll read other answers when finished.

Dh This is an interesting discussion, and I appreciate it. I finished the book yesterday, having sometimes thought about not finishing it as I went. I think I would have liked it much better if it had been a short story. (Saunders is unrivaled as a short story writer, in my opinion.) I think it went on too long without significant developments.
What I liked:
1) the incredible array of voices, each one so distinctive and pitch-perfect
2) the unbelievable use of language--I marveled at the author's perfect word choice again and again and how his use of the exactly right words allowed him to present extremely disturbing statements/memories without crossing the line into sensationalism or other offensiveness.
What I didn't like so much:
1) the use of Abraham Lincoln (I don't see that the book had much to do with Lincoln, other than as a time frame).
2) the lack of a point that resonated with me. I'm not that interested in theology, and any morality here beyond that seemed pretty thin.

But if anyone wants to enlighten me further about anything I might have misunderstood, I'll be glad.

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Donna I think that Bevin's Bardo-body becoming a vessel composed only of sensory organs signified his regret of not having adequately appreciated and employed his senses in life. His manifestation of regret was parallel to Vollum's regret of not having consummated his marriage that led to his penis becoming ever larger and comedically longer and longer. The Reverend was proud of his church serving the "right" people, the deserving people. He had observed the outward trappings of religious observation rather the experience of spiritual transcendence. His regret of having been so judgemental may have led to his becoming the recipient of an unwelcome heavenly judgment.

Jeanne Subramaniam The Reverend was not sent back but ran back to the Bardo when he realised what was in store for him. He was allowed to do so perhaps to give him a chance to redeem himself, which he does, or because it's inevitable that he'll come back at some time

Joyeous57 Wikipedia said the ghosts that inhabit the bardo are disfigured by desires they failed to act upon while alive

Gail

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Lincoln in the Bardo

by George Saunders

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